Red Dawn 3 – Lenin Gets Dangerous

This episode is all about Lenin’s youth, and what he was doing starting from the point of his brother’s execution, up to revolution. Turns out, he was a bit of a lazy jerk. And the factual list of things is long, tedious and…actually, not that fun. Instead, what IS fun are stories about Lenin from this time period, from his contemporaries, excerpts from his works and talking about his general ideas. Because seriously, I’m not going to list all the socialist gatherings in Europe he went to – but I’m giving you, comrades, a feel on what went down in these gatherings. Oh, and to help me with that, this week we have Prof. CJ on the show, from Dangerous History Podcast. He’s very knowledgeable about revolutions and revolutionaries, and makes sure that everything I speak a bit more understandable. Also: Warning! We do have a sound issues near the end of the episode, that couldn’t be fixed – it sounded fine on skype, but Zencastr had some lags apparently. Alice did what she could.

Enjoy the show! And today’s picture is Lenin as a youth. No, that’s not Di Caprio and some photoshop. That’s actually Lenin.

In regards about CJ’s comment about ‘leftist academic attitudes about Lenin’, the most benign attitude I’ve witnessed espoused about Lenin from a ‘leftist’ academic in person is just that he wasn’t as bad as Stalin, but still evil. In print, I’ve read decades old assessments that concur w/ CJ’s opinion.